Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/80

 the Legion of Honour in the Artillery Pavilion of the Military School.

Some of the Socialists complained of the amount of energy which Jaurès threw into the "Affaire," although as a matter of fact it was only during 1898 and 1899 that he gave it much of his time. But there were those who said that the work had diverted him from the propaganda of Socialism, that it was a quarrel amongst the enemies of Socialism which they should be left to settle amongst themselves, since it had nothing to do with the workers. One writer averred that if Dreyfus had been a worker he would long since have been forgotten. While the matter was still in the balance Jaurès made a splendid appeal to his Socialist comrades in one of his articles in La Petite Républigue.

When it becomes certain, he says, that Dreyfus was condemned on evidence which he himself was not shown, then "On that day we Socialists shall have a right to set ourselves up against all the leaders who have fought against us in the name of the principles of the French Revolution. What have you done, we shall cry to them, with the Rights of Man and the liberty of the individual? You have despised it. You have yielded it all up to the insolence of military power. You are renegades of the bourgeois revolution.

"Oh, I am not mistaken and I understand the